First World War Galleries Reopen at Imperial War Museum

Slide Show | Imperial War Museum The First World War Galleries reopen at the Imperial War Museum in London.

Tom Jamieson for The New York Times

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

August 15, 2014

LONDON — A moonscape of craters, mud and shattered stumps fills a wall-sized video screen; you can hear shrieking shells and shattering blasts; an enormous British howitzer, meant to pulverize the enemy’s defenses, points toward the fields. The only thing missing in this gallery, devoted to the Battle of the Somme at the Imperial War Museum here, is the ability to conceive of 20,000 British dead and 37,000 wounded or missing in the first day of fighting, and more than a million casualties over all during five months.

It is one of the most powerful presentations at the new First World War Galleries here, suggesting that this seemingly futile battle was actually a turning point. These galleries, which replace an older presentation that was a classic for a generation, are also part of a $67 million rebuilding of the museum, completed in time to commemorate the centennial of Britain’s entry into the war. That occasion was somberly observed across Britain on Aug. 4 with moments of silence, extinguished lights and the scattered petals of red poppies — the war’s symbol of bloodied innocence and death.

At the museum, the artifacts and images are much less delicate. A stream of stretchers bearing the wounded winds through a silent 1916 film about the Battle of the Somme. Another display shows “geophones”: sonic sensors used with stethoscope ear pieces to detect the enemy burrowing tunnels. We see a tube-shaped soft helmet infused with caustic chemicals meant to counter phosgene gas — a poison almost undetectable, we learn, except for its scent of moldy hay. One case is filled with an array of nail-studded clubs used in combat and evoking medieval dungeons.

Other artifacts among the 1,300 shown here are less terrifying: a spiffy red fez worn by an African soldier fighting with German colonial forces in Cameroon or, from late in the war, German rationing posters that try to cloak desperate need with Grimm-like imagery of woodland walks: “If you want oil, collect beechnuts!”

Yet these new galleries are worth paying attention to, not only for what they say about World War I, but also for what they say about contemporary approaches to history. The Imperial War Museum was conceived of while the war still raged; it opened in 1920, after the armistice. It is an institution that has reflected Britain’s vision of that war, and, eventually, of the many wars that followed. (The museum has also expanded into five different branches, including the Churchill War Rooms in London.)

So we approach this main building seeking hints of a grand vision that is both national and all-embracing. The histories seem to demand it. In the central atrium, redesigned by Foster & Partners, a Spitfire fighter plane that flew 57 combat missions in the 1940 Battle of Britain is suspended. A German V2 rocket stands here, too — much like one that exploded near the museum in January 1945, killing 43 people. These wars have hit close to home. Yet that larger vision is not to be found. Nor is there much sense of an overriding national purpose in the museum’s chronicle. This is no accident.

When it opened, King George V hailed the museum as a “lasting memorial of common effort and common sacrifice” by which “liberty and right were preserved for mankind.” But historians — even other museums — have chipped away at such assertions of virtue.

Political leaders at the recent commemorations still invoked some of those claims in commemorative speeches. But at the museum, the main response is not to propose a historical interpretation of the war but — as James Taylor, the lead curator of the World War I exhibition explained — to evoke the experience of the war and show how attitudes at the time affected its course.

The exhibition’s designer, the firm of Casson Mann, has stated that here “visitors will see the war through the eyes of the people who experienced it” and that the galleries will “ground the visitor in the present tense.” Sound effects, video, touch screens, interactive games — the goal is really to create a Museum of Experience, like so many museums being built these days (including the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York). If history creates disagreement or conflict or controversy, then one approach is to emphasize experiences rather than interpretations; there is no argument in experience.

Here, for example, display areas are surrounded by cement-colored platforms inscribed with phrases from the diaries or letters in the museum’s collection. A game for young visitors — played by touching images on a light table — asks them to mimic the repetitive motions of factory workers turning out shoes or cutting timber for military use. The home front, as in many war exhibitions, ends up becoming as crucial as the battle front.

And, as it turns out, World War I is almost impossible to appreciate without examining experience. As a recent exhibition at the University of Texas at Austin suggested, we have come to understand this war through its portrayal in poetry, drama and the visual arts. This is one reason, too, to pay attention to an art show at the Imperial War Museum, running through March 8 — “Truth and Memory: British Art of the First World War” — in which painters like C. R. W. Nevinson and Paul Nash strain to convey their experiences at the front. For World War I, experience has played a dominant role in interpretation.

It is peculiar, then, that one of the main experiences of the museum’s previous World War I galleries — its darkened, cramped and noisy trench, featuring life-size soldier models — has not been improved but made less effective. The trench here seems like an antiseptic corridor with light projections.

In some ways, too, the appeal to experience can cause problems. We get less of an understanding of international forces or diplomatic matters of strategic debates or historical issues. Why did the German command decide to go to war when it did? We won’t learn that from soldiers’ letters home.

The emphasis on personal experience can also restrict perspective. We never get any real understanding here of the crucial Eastern front, or of how the Bolshevik Revolution was related to the war’s progress. The war’s complicated afterlife is reduced to a series of small-scale exhibits, while the large issues (like the rise of Nazism) are alluded to in a short concluding video.

Though the museum also includes a major exhibition on the Holocaust (from the year 2000) and an intriguing exploration of British espionage and counterterrorism, the new galleries’ experiential approach is taken in many of the displays on other floors, which are meant to sample the history of Britain’s recent wars. The result is fragmented, with minimal context. Explanatory labels are placed not near the objects but on large, sometimes distant panels. We see a Taliban motor bike, a twisted frame from the World Trade Center attack, a barrel hidden by the Nazis, the witness stand used at the trial of the accused Lockerbie terrorists.

In this telegraphic survey, the Cold War is reduced to a struggle between symmetrical behemoths, capitalism fighting Communism. And in the atrium, the machinery of war is joined by a battered Reuters Land Rover that was hit by an Israeli missile or shrapnel in Gaza in 2006, leading to accusations that Israel targeted the press; why is this artifact given so central a place?

No matter. The museum is potent. And some experiences really are indelible. Harry Patch, the last British veteran of the trenches to die (in 2009) is quoted near the close of the First World War galleries: “I’ve tried for 80 years to forget it. But I can’t.”